Universal Land Registry to Support Independent Economic Development in Tanzania

A simple land property registration procedure cannot be taken for granted in Tanzania. Nevertheless, it is crucial for private investment and wealth accumulation in one of the poorest countries in the world. To improve the formal land registration procedures is currently one of the topmost items on the agenda of the Tanzania Government. To help speed up the technical implementation of an improved land registration procedure, a group of volunteers – GIS experts and students from Europe and North America – elaborated the solution design for a Universal Land Registry (ULR) application. A prototype implementation demonstrates the feasibility of the solution with Open Source Software. The solution design with use cases, data model and solution architecture is presented in this paper. Furthermore, some implementation considerations are made to support the distributed nature of the different partners involved from land use planners at national level to the individual land owner on his or her plot. In particular, different requirements related to data quality (spatial precision, completeness etc.) are considered for a viable solution in such a vast country like Tanzania. As land use and land ownership information is core information for a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), a close organizational and technical integration of the ULR with all efforts to construct a NSDI is envisaged.